Category: History

Aptheker’s willful blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence

The longest chapter of my book on Herbert Aptheker—Communist theoretician, African American history researcher, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s literary executor (see my previous post)—elaborates upon my claim that Aptheker’s Stalinism is the only credible explanation of his failure to cite The Black Jacobins (TBJ) of C. L. R. James, a Trotskyist.

After all, I argued, Aptheker’s scholarly specialization lay in slave revolts; the subject of TBJ is the 1791 slave revolt in San Domingo (SDR) led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the only successful such revolt in modern times; TBJ was published in New York in 1938, a year after Columbia University awarded Aptheker his master’s degree (for which he had written the first book on Nat Turner’s 1831 decidedly unsuccessful slave revolt) and as he was immersed in doctoral studies that culminated in his 1943 American Negro Slave Revolts (ANSR).

Further, TBJ had been reviewed in periodicals familiar to Aptheker (e.g., The New York Times, The Journal of Negro History, Time Magazine); Aptheker devoted several pages of ANSR to the impact of the SDR on the American slave revolts he studied.

 

 

In my book I noted that ANSR’s bibliography listed, not TBJ, but James’s “The History of Negro Revolt,” which essay exhaustively comprised the September 1938 issue of Fact, a London periodical. Aptheker’s citation of the obscure periodical, but not the full-length, widely reviewed book published the same year by a major New York house (Dial) seemed to me to be a deliberate effort not to give James the credit he was due. (Aptheker never quoted James’s words.)

And, as it happens, this move was also ironic, although the irony only hit me the other day. I wish I had noted a few years ago what was right under my nose. Continue reading “Aptheker’s willful blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence”

Guest Blogger: Hugh Murray on Herbert Aptheker

Hugh Murray

As I noted in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness (and elsewhere on this blog), I can trace my friendship with historian Hugh Murray to the early ‘70s, when we were Aptheker’s research assistants. His review appeared on Amazon last week, a first for the book. Below is the expanded version he posted on his own blog.

Henry Steele Commager, 1902-1998

I’ve appreciated his criticisms enough to share them with you. I especially want to know what you think of Hugh’s defense of Herbert Aptheker as an historian, an evaluation I questioned in the book. Henry Steele Commager, Hugh’s counterexample, ignored African American intellectuals in his monumental 1950 The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s. Consequently, there’s no mention therein of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright or any of the creators of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Does this neglect disqualify Commager as an historian? Can Commager’s works be trusted despite that neglect? The doctoral advisor to Aptheker’s biographer told him to find another topic, for Aptheker’s works could not be trusted; the judge in David Irving’s libel trial adjudged that Irving’s could not. Since we cannot reasonably make knowing everything the precondition of knowing anything, Hugh argues, we have to live with the fact of bias. How much bias, however, and what kind crosses the line?

Anthony Flood

Herbert Aptheker’s Blindness as Historian—and Blindness Spreads

Hugh Murray

In his short book Mr. Flood has written an essential work for anyone interested in the many volumes of history written by Dr. Herbert Aptheker. The questions Flood raises, however, are not limited to Aptheker, but concern all historians and indeed all intellectuals who were members of the Communist Party USA (CP), and other Communist parties worldwide. The question simply put, “Can they be trusted?” Continue reading “Guest Blogger: Hugh Murray on Herbert Aptheker”